Any cloud migration project can be challenging, but the benefits of moving to more modern and efficient systems can be enormous.

I think that the biggest issue to deal with might be change management. That portion of a migraton can take the longest to complete, as that portion often goes on for many months or years afterward. Sometimes government can be slow to change, and as a result these things take a lot of time.

When I used to edit product reviews at Network Computing, I discouraged reviewers from dinging products for installation and setup difficulties. Unless the effort was truly hellish, that was a very small part of the scoring -- for the simple reason that (for the most part) you do it only once. IT teams should live with a new model for a year or so, six months at minimum, to let memories of the spinup fade and a balanced picture emerge before rendering judgement.

Owens of the Office of Inspector General at Health and Human Services hits the nail on the head. You can't begin to phase out legacy systems and reap the benefit of simplified, standard operations until you've discovered just how unstandard you've become. Every fiefdom knows what it wants, and what it wants is something different. If you can get to the cloud, moving there will end the constant process of customized systems.

You're right, Charlie. In addition: One of the big failures in federal IT investment management has been the lack of follow through to kill legacy systems, once their replacement(s) is up and running. I suspect that's in part because the old systems are so cobbled together, no one knows for sure what they'll lose by switiching over to the cloud (which gives IT managers more leverage to hold onto their unique systems.)

Exactly. The fear of killing off legacy systems, or users reluctant to use new systems negate many of the benefits of moving to the cloud in the first place. Fear of outages, complexity and changing the nature of workers, especially those who have been using older systems for many years, not only hinder the adoption of these new services, but pose a risk for IT teams who are dealing with managing the migration of data to the newer services.

As InformationWeek Government readers were busy firming up their fiscal year 2015 budgets, we asked them to rate more than 30 IT initiatives in terms of importance and current leadership focus. No surprise, among more than 30 options, security is No. 1. After that, things get less predictable.